Buying Art Online: Eyestorm Sees "Limited" Future in Web Sales

LONDON—Back in the late 1990s, in that first surge of Internet optimism, numerous entrepreneurs thought they could make their fortunes selling fine art online. Most of those first-generation sites, of course, crashed and burned long ago, as art proved to be an especially tricky "product" to sell in cyberspace.

But that was then. What about selling art online today? Are the circumstances now fundamentally different—and more in favor of online art sellers finding an audience?

After all, the art market in general is sizzling, and more and more people are buying more and more types of goods online. A recent USA Today article even argued that, thanks to online art sales, "More people are making a living as artists, more people are buying art, and more art is selling at a wider spectrum of prices … [and] online art shopping has grown as a complement to gallery hopping and art-fair shopping."

So how about it? Is the world finally ready to begin spending serious money on online art?

To begin our investigation, we decided to contact Eyestorm.com; the site is an especially appropriate place to start for a few reasons.

For starters, it's one of the most popular buying sites, the first that gets returned after typing the words "buy contemporary art online" into Google. For another, it was actually around in those first, heady days of the e-commerce revolution and can compare those times to today. Finally, it has recently announced a number of major new strategy initiatives—in direct response to current market conditions.

Eyestorm, based in the U.K., was founded in 1999; went into liquidation in 2001; was rescued shortly thereafter by a private equity group; and, in 2003, it took over Britart.com, which currently functions as a separate sister site (although the two sites will merge soon).

In March of this year, the company appointed a new CEO, Tom Flynn, who, among other accomplishments, is responsible for artintelligence.co.uk, and probably knows his way around current art business as well as anyone.

When offered the position, Flynn admitted, "My immediate response was, 'Well, surely that's a broken company.' It's a fact that none of the previous Eyestorm iterations worked. The company never got to profit and burnt through a significant amount of venture capital.

"But what interested me and attracted me," Flynn continued, "was the prospect of trying to make something that has generally been resistant to e-commerce, namely fine art, into a successful Web application."

Flynn firmly believes we have finally reached a point where online sales sites will reach a wide and receptive audience. "The [online] market is in a state of immense change at the moment, not least because of the growing confidence that buyers all over the world are beginning to express in online transactions. All of the objective stats demonstrate that e-commerce is going through a renaissance. It's now beginning to grow in areas that were resistant to it."

"Limited" Success

The key to what will make Eyestorm successful, Flynn argues, is a focus on limited-edition artwork as opposed to one-of-a-kind originals.

Eyestorm's current offerings from about 50 artists include a handful of three- and four-figure paintings, but the majority of works are limited-edition photographs, prints and multiple-edition sculptures. Some of these artists are people you've never heard of, but among those you have are Noboyushi Araki, Peter Blake, Helmut Newton, Marc Quinn, Gavin Turk and William Wegman. Even Picasso is represented by a few etchings (in editions of 100 and 260).

But going forward, the site plans to deal only in editions that are exclusive to Eyestorm. There are already some of these exclusives available (from Newton, Vic Reeves and Antony Micallef, for example).

This approach is an essential strategy for an online site, Flynn believes. For one, it means buyers will have to come to Eyestorm to acquire these works; for another, the editions approach will keep the prices of most works well below £1,000 (and therefore well within the parameters of what people have proven to be willing to spend online).